“As we received more data about this pandemic, my colleagues and I became more alarmed. But it took some time to convince everyone else. Most of my Facebook friends are very progressive, educated people. But friends of friends are a different story,” said UCLA’s Dr. Otto Yang. (UCLA’s Maria Santini, Dr. Lisa Dabby, Omai Garner and Dr. Mark Morocco are also quoted.)

[UCLA’s] Paul Simon, chief science officer for Los Angeles County’s public health department, noted that the county was averaging 50 deaths from coronavirus a day, eclipsing cardiac disease as the top killer. “If this mortality were to continue for the whole year — we hope it doesn’t, but if it did — COVID would be the leading cause of death in Los Angeles County,” Simon said. (Simon was also quoted in the Los Angeles Daily News.)

“I think that we are still unsure of where we stand on the curve, because we don’t have adequate testing in place. We are still unsure what antibody tests mean — whether or not they mean that people have immunity or not,” said UCLA’s Anne Rimoin. (Rimoin was also interviewed on KTLA-TV.)

Over the years, it’s a situation that’s become “just like a time bomb,” said Arturo Vargas Bustamante, a UCLA professor who has studied Mexico’s healthcare system. “This pandemic revealed chronic under-investment in the public health system.”

“I do think we will need to re-address [the guidelines] if [the pandemic] goes on a long time,” says Molly Quinn, M.D., an OB/GYN specialized in endocrinology and infertility at the UCLA Medical Center in Santa Monica, California. “There’s no data that a month or two of delay will impact success [of fertility treatments]. But six months will have an impact.”

“If you look at the state polling that’s out there, governors are getting a higher bump in handling of the crisis. That’s been particularly good for Governor Newsom and Governor Cuomo. Those two are certainly leading in public opinion approval, in terms of handling the crisis, well above Trump,” said UCLA’s Matt Barreto (approx. 3:00 mark).

Because testing has lagged so badly in the United States, “right now we don’t know how many people are infected,” said Karin Michels, professor and chair of the epidemiology department at UCLA’s School of Public Health. “The biggest unknown (for disease models) is the denominator. How many people out of the infected are actually dying or wind up in the ICU? We have no idea at this point.”

Social stressors, including microaggressions such as racial slurs, could weaken the immune system and make a person sick, said Gilbert Gee, community health sciences professor at University of California, Los Angeles, and an expert in health inequalities in immigrant populations. Stress responses, or the fight-or-flight response created by the body when faced with danger in the environment, could start wearing down the body if it is used over and over, Gee said. This effect was seen in many minority groups such as African Americans, Latinos and Asians.

Political and policy experts say the flurry of rollbacks could reflect a White House strategy to have new rules in place before they might be subject to the Congressional Review Act, which allows Congress to strike down regulations and which Democrats could employ if they win the White House and both congressional chambers in November. “It’s something that the Trump administration has to be thinking about,” said Sean Hecht, co-executive director of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the UCLA School of Law.

About $12.7 billion in federal funding for Los Angeles County is based on census-related estimates, according to a UCLA study released in March. The study released by the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research and Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science estimated that a 10% undercount could cost the county $586 million in federal dollars.

New research by UCLA scientists may help solve the question of whether our atmosphere was formed by gases naturally emitted by the Earth’s interior - through events like volcanic eruptions, for example - or was added later, perhaps due to comets colliding into the Earth soon after it formed. The study, by Edward Young, a professor of Earth, planetary, and space sciences, and Jabrane Labidi, a UCLA postdoctoral fellow, was published in the journal Nature. Their work provides a strong argument for the second scenario.